About

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Pushing the Frontiers of Inclusive STEM Education

STEM education is an important gatekeeper for individual educational attainment and economic success, as well as for national innovation and competition. Unfortunately, access to high-quality STEM education remains unevenly distributed.

The RISE Postdoctoral Training Program, based in the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER), was built upon the proposition that the path to improving STEM learning outcomes more broadly requires recognizing that existing views of learning are based on limited beliefs and visions about what can be learned, who can learn and how learning occurs. The scientific community needs to train and empower researchers who are competent in, and can further develop, cutting-edge theory and methods that identify and disrupt these beliefs and that serve as the basis for crafting more effective pedagogies and interventions.

Our approach integrates a holistic learning framework, featuring the RISE principles (Nasir et al., 2021), into a model for postdoctoral training that prepares the next generation of STEM education researchers.

Illustration of three people helping each other climb three bar chart bars that increase in height. Math symbols are in the background.

The RISE principles hold that learning is:

Rooted

Rooted in basic biological and cognitive processes

Integrated

Integrated with socioemotional and identity development

Situated

Situated in and shaped by social and cultural contexts

Experienced

Experienced as embodied and socially coordinated

Our research is funded through a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.